Reddit mentions of Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)

I'm not sure how much my words will be of use for you, as I am myself not yet Catholic (I'm currently going through RCIA). However, I can relate with regard to a lack of Catholic friends. I'm an immigrant from India who was raised in a Hindu family; most of my friends are Indian and nominally Hindu. I've had only a couple of Christian friends in my life and never a Catholic friend. Reading and researching through books, articles, podcasts, videos, etc. have led me to the faith.

Oftentimes, in defending the faith, I have debated my family, my friends, and others close to me. It became clear to me that I needed a systematic plan if I was going to do this with any shred of ability. Here's mine. Perhaps it will be of use to you or somebody else who clicks on your post because they can relate.

1. Learn logic. I'm working through Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft right now. It's clear, readable, has plenty of examples, many of which are from interesting works, such as those of G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis. It's an investment, to be sure, as it's running for ~ $20 online, but it's well worth it.
   
   
2. Study Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas is the universal doctor of the Catholic Church. You're not going to find a better source of philosophy, theology, and wisdom than this saint. Now, I don't recommend jumping right into the Summa Theologica or the Summa Contra Gentiles, at least not without a study guide, primarily because modern thought holds assumptions which Aquinas would have rejected. Therefore, to understand Aquinas' arguments, and really the arguments of any philosopher before Descartes, you need to understand the basic metaphysics (the understanding of being as being) of the classical (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) and medieval (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) philosophers. Edward Feser is an American analytical philosopher who is also an orthodox Roman Catholic. He's written two books which I would highly recommend. First, and foremost, I think you will be well served by his The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (I'm sure you can see why). It's very readable but also deep. It's also polemical; you'll laugh out loud quite a bit. Second, I would recommend his Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide. This is an introduction to Thomistic philosophy. It goes over the metaphysical foundations, Aquinas' Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God, Aquinas' philosophy of ethics, and Aquinas' philosophy of psychology.
   
   
3. Once you have worked through these three books, I think you'll be ready to work through the more difficult works. However, and this is key, the vast, vast, vast majority of atheists and skeptics you'll come across and meet in your journey through this world can be easily and completely refuted if you familiarize yourself with and understand and think through the arguments laid out by Feser in these two books. Depending on your intelligence level and the availability of time, going through these three books might take you a bit of time. Don't worry. Take it slow. Once you understand their relevance and validity, you'll be able to both defend the faith and also show how atheism is false, incoherent, and dangerous.
   
   In summary, I'd recommend reading the following books in this order:
   
4. The Last Superstition by Edward Feser: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504537006&sr=8-1&keywords=the+last+superstition
   
5. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Edward Feser: https://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Guides-ebook/dp/B00O0G3BEW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504537006&sr=8-2&keywords=the+last+superstition
   
6. Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft: https://www.amazon.com/Socratic-Logic-Questions-Aristotelian-Principles/dp/1587318083/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
   
   God Bless and take care.

As a theist....

Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Edward Feser. Only $4.80 on Kindle!

There are various laws, they are related to each other. Aquinas is a great read, btw, covers the beginning of this stuff.

The natural law, or law of nature, has to do with the natures of things, what their purpose, end, etc are for. So sex's end is to make babies; something that frustrates that end, such as contraception, is unnatural.

The Greek philosophy version is basically identical to Aquinas's, though he ties it into the Divine Law which includes the natural law (they can't contradict) but goes beyond it via revelation.

And if you are on an Aquinas kick, Feser has a book on him: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O0G3BEW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Why in the world would you depend on a Google search? Aren't you supposed -judging by your post history and reading- to have books lying around?

Okay, this is my last reply. That's because potency and act divide being in such a way that whatever is, is either pure act, or of necessity it is composed of potency and act as primary and intrinsic principle. If you say God has some sort of absence in its nature, then it is to say that he is not pure act, which means that he is a composed being of potentiality and actuality. This means that something else put together God and actualize God's potentiality "everything whose act of existing is other than its nature [must] have its act of existing from another" (De ente et Essentia, 4).

If you want a beginner guide, you can fetch yourself a copy of Aquinas by Edward Feser, you really need to brush your Metaphysics first.

Good luck.

Generally speaking, we believe claims when they appear more likely true than not, or the best explanation for something.

To give you an example of a claim that appears true:

Observe that for any cause-and-effect sequence (wherein the potential for some state of some thing is actualized -- such as an ice cube to potentially become liquid, and then it is actually liquid), there is always a first cause, then either the effect follows immediately thereafter, or there is a subsequent chain of causes leading to the effect (e.g. lighting a match held to the ice causes it to melt, or heating the air heats the air which then heats the cube causing it to melt). It is impossible to have an effect without a cause, because the effect cannot bring itself into being from nothing, because by definition 'nothing' is the absence of anything. Hence the Unmoved Mover argument proves that for any observed change, the first element of the sequence must actualize the next one without itself needing to be actualized (i.e. it brings a potential to become reality without itself needing to be made real), and this Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church) calls God.

If this argument appears to you to be true, then you should believe that there exists some reality that doesn't need to be made real by something else, aka an 'unmoved mover' to be called God. We must then read more philosophy to see what else we can figure out about this reality. Is this reality an impersonal force? Is it the universe itself? Is it a rational agent? Etc. I've got a copy of Ed Feser's Aquinas hoping to learn more.

Real essentialism is demonstrated through the fixed laws governing the relationships between the sides and angles of a triangle. You can’t “invent” a triangle whose interior angles add up to whatever you want, because the concept of a triangle is something we discover rather than invent. Are you familiar with Oderberg? https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Routledge-Studies-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/041587212X

> Where is it?

Essences are immaterial.

> I've read most of it and have a fairly good understanding of what Aquinas says on a lot of important subjects

Im calling bullshit if you aren’t even passably competent in his metaphysics to articulate the difference between essentially and accidentally ordered cause and effect relationships.

> Aquinas believes that people "assent" in faith about propositional objects because their "truth" is directly revealed (obviously divinely) by God. He claims the will disposes the intellect (i.e human reason) in accepting those truth claims, because they come from God. This all relies "the basis of testimony carrying divine authority" to use Aquinas's words.

Not quite correct.

“To be sure, a part of theology (what is generally called “revealed theology”) is based on what Aquinas regards as truths that have been revealed to us by God. To that extent theology is based on faith. But “faith,” for Aquinas, does not mean an irrational will to believe something for which there is no evidence. It is rather a matter of believing something on the basis of divine authority (ST II-II. 4.1), where the fact that it really has been revealed by God can be confirmed by the miracles performed by the one through whom God revealed it (ST II-II. 2.9). In any case, there is another part of theology (known as “natural theology”) that does not depend on faith, but rather concerns truths about God that can be known via reason alone.”

-Ed Feser Aquinas (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O0G3BEW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

So no, I still don’t think you actually understand what you’re talking about.

I would start with Edward Feser's introductions to Aquinas.

1. Aquinas: a Beginner's Guide- https://www.amazon.com.au/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Guides-ebook/dp/B00O0G3BEW ; and/or
   
2. The Last Superstition (this one is a bit polemical, so one will have to be charitable if one is an unbeliever, though one will likely enjoy it if one is a believer) https://www.amazon.com.au/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+Last+Superstition&qid=1568081318&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
   
   If you're a total newbie, this should serve as a good launching point to begin to study Aquinas himself. There are of course more thinkers than Aquinas (I'm very partial to Anselm over Aquinas in many matters), but the skills and habits of mind you acquire in understanding Aquinas are useful for reading other thinkers in the tradition.
   
   
   There is of course also no substitute for getting to know your pagan philosophers, in particular Aristotle and Plato. Try Aristotle's Eudemian ethics or the Republic by Plato.

>Really? Is there a place I can learn more about this?

I can recommend this publication of Pascal's Pensees, which has an excellent overview of the scholarship surrounding Pascal's postmortem publications.

As far as the errors of Pascal's wager, you shouldn't have too much trouble searching for "atheist responses to Pascal's wager". Although some don't recognize the simplicity of the error (false dichotomy of Christianity vs. Atheism), their responses, generally, are quite correct. Pascal's analysis leaves out the opportunity cost of the risk that Islam or some other religion will turn out to be true, and thus his analysis is incomplete. Also, Pascal essentially begs the question of whether the Christian God really is good. Of course Pascal would take that for granted, but unbelievers can be understandably skeptical on this point, given that this God supposedly killed a whole planet full of people in Noah's flood, and then commanded the Israelites to wage a bloody war against the Canaanites. If it is not established and agreed that the God of Christianity is good, then the cost/reward analysis becomes entirely subjective.

The situation this has created appears to me somewhat like this: Christians perceive the intuitive force of applying game theoretical considerations to the problem of religion, and thus continue to push Pascal's Wager, which superficially appears to them unproblematic, as it represents the problem of religion as it appears to them. But, the problem of religion appears to atheists in a very different way, which makes the problems of Pascal's Wager very obvious in their eyes. In the end, both sides end up talking past each other.

I think my approach could, possibly, bridge the gap. Instead of looking at the problem of religion at the level of "Which of these 4,000 religions is true?", I take the analysis back to the fundamental questions of religions: "Does God exist? and, If God does exist, Is God good?" This amounts to a nested double-dichotomy, and thus a true trilemma. Game theory principles can then be applied in a consistent, coherent way.

>But if something is justified just because it'll make you happier, doesn't that apply to anything?

The fact that something will "make you happier" can only be considered one aspect of the total analysis. And not a very useful one, all by itself. Qualitative judgments like that are not super helpful, unless we have reason to believe that they amount to infinitudes of reward or cost. For example, it is not just that the existence and goodness of God can make me "happy", but that the happiness that that kind of being is capable of giving is INFINITE. Eating dirt might make you happy for an hour or so, but a good God can make you happy forever (at least in principle).

The reason this is critical is because, while it is difficult to compare qualitative elements (and a game theoretical analysis is essentially a comparative analysis), we can nevertheless easily compare infinitudes with finitudes. For example, it is hard to compare the "good" experienced in a moment of heavenly existence (being characterized by peace, pleasure, spiritual fulfillment, love, etc.), and the "evil" experienced in a moment of earthly suffering. Both momentary experiences will be qualitative and finite. However, because the "good" to be experienced in heaven can, at least in principle, endure forever, while on the other hand the sufferings of earthly existence are temporary, we can easily see that the good of the end outweighs the evil of the means.

Now, the game theory analysis is more complicated than that, but the principle remains in effect. Infinite qualities do beat out finite ones.

Did you read the blog post I linked? I tried to be very exhaustive in my analysis of the potential costs and rewards associated with the basic options in the trilemma of the problem of religion. You should see that my argument rests on much more substance than the mere fact that believing in the existence and goodness of God makes me "happy". At least, I hope that one can see that. Obviously, I am open to criticism on that count.

>Is there any known answer to this question?

Hehe. Not that I've found in my research. It looks like there is an epistemological gap, which cannot be bridged by the normal operations of science or reason. There are many proposed arguments on the various sides of the argument, and I'm still working through some of them. Feser's Philosophy of the Mind presents many of the currently and historically popular arguments from all sides, in what is intended to be a fair representation. This book is intended as an introduction, and might be a good pickup for you as well.

While I have "adopted", for the time being, a hylemorphic dualist position, it is early days for me, and this may become subject to change. However, as a personal testimony, it makes sense of things that have always been vague, loose, unconnected bits of understanding for me. As someone else represented to me, learning the A-T metaphysical worldview has been like going down the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland, but in reverse. The nonsense in my worldview is rapidly being exposed, and the coherence of reality seems to be coming into focus.

>I believe that they can but I'm having a hard time understanding how they exist. Probably in a more simple way. Does that make sense?

Yes. I think you have good metaphysical instincts.

In my concept map, connecting all of the concepts of A-T metaphysics, God is in the center as Pure Being Itself (as opposed to one being among many). Among the attributes of God which Aquinas proves through the ways of negation, causation... and something else having to do with the Principle of Proportionate Causality... is "simplicity". The attribute of simplicity took me a long time to understand, and I resisted the idea the whole time. But then it made sense.

The reason I wanted to resist it is because I thought that God being "simple" meant He had to be one thing, and one thing only; and by "things" I kind of meant the way I perceive things in the natural order. For example, I have intelligence and power, and these things come through totally different ontological pathways. Thus, in me, intelligence and power are two different things. So I took intelligence and power in God to be the same kind of things as they are in me, and thus took it as nonsense to say that God was both intelligent and powerful, and yet "simple".

That is where Aquinas' doctrine of analogy helps. Intelligence and power still exist in God, but in God, they are not different things from each other. They are still "analogically" like the intelligence and power that are in me, being not exactly the same, while also not being completely different.

These concepts work out so that God's existence just is His essence, which just is His power, which just is His intelligence, and so on.

Now, as we branch out from God, we find things other than God MUST have an essence which is distinct from their existence. It is possible to have both incorporeal things as well as corporeal things in this realm. But corporeal things will be more complex than incorporeal things. That is because the "essence" of an incorporeal thing will not include matter at all, while still having elements belonging to the concept of a "form".

And it is argued that the only kind of "incorporeal substance" can be intellect (and will, but will is something that follows from intellect). So, intellect belongs in the region lying between the perfect simplicity of God, and the accident-prone complexity of corporeality. And we find ourselves as bridges between the incorporeal and the corporeal: rational animals.

Aquinas is not terribly long. I think you would get a lot out of it.

No. As I said a few minutes ago:

> What's involved here are two differing metaphysics for cause and effect: One is that potentialities are actualized (Thomas Aquinas); the other is that reality exists as an irrational brute-fact series of snapshots (Bertrand Russell). Material science has nothing to say about the metaphysics of an object's being: It only says what it's made of.

You might read Ed Feser's Aquinas for a primer on this metaphysics.